Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

WASHINGTON – Earlier this week Attorney General John Ashcroft warned of an attack planned on America for sometime in the coming months. That may happen, but NBC News has learned one of Ashcroft’s sources is highly suspect.

In warning Americans to brace for a possible attack, Ashcroft cited what he called “credible intelligence from multiple sources,” saying that “just after New Year’s, al-Qaida announced openly that preparations for an attack on the United States were 70 percent complete.… After the March 11 attack in Madrid, Spain, an al-Qaida spokesman announced that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack in the United States were complete.

But terrorism experts tell NBC News there’s no evidence a credible al-Qaida spokesman ever said that, and the claims actually were made by a largely discredited group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, known for putting propaganda on the Internet.

“This particular group is not really taken seriously by Western intelligence,”

Experts have been warning that electronic voting in its current form cannot be trusted. There is a real danger that elections could be stolen by nefarious computer code, or that accidental errors could change an election’s outcome. But state officials invariably say that the machines are tested by federally selected laboratories. The League of Women Voters, in a paper dismissing calls for voter-verified paper trails, puts its faith in “the certification and standards process.”

But there is, to begin with, a stunning lack of transparency surrounding this process. Voters have a right to know how voting machine testing is done. Testing companies disagree, routinely denying government officials and the public basic information. Kevin Shelley, the California secretary of state, could not get two companies testing his state’s machines to answer even basic questions. One of them, Wyle Laboratories, refused to tell us anything about how it tests, or about its testers’ credentials. “We don’t discuss our voting machine work,” said Dan Reeder, a Wyle spokesman.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

This joyous memory came rushing back after the grim revelation of yet another kink in the torture regime at Abu Ghraib. As if sexual humiliation and violent abuse weren’t punishment enough, the guards also made prisoners violate Islamic practice by force-feeding them booze.

How do we square the tales of American cruelty with the promise of democracy we thought we were bringing to Iraq? One obvious way might be to acknowledge with some humility that our often proud history has always had a fault line, running from slavery to Wounded Knee to My Lai. (Read accounts of Andersonville, the Confederate-run Civil War prison at which some 13,000 died, for literal echoes of some of Abu Ghraib’s inhumanity.) But there’s an easier way out in 2004: blame Janet Jackson for what’s gone wrong in Iraq, or if not her, then Jenna Jameson.

When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors note published Wednesday. The editors wrote:

“We have found … instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been … In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge … We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”

The editors conceded what intelligence sources had told me and numerous other reporters: that Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House and had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles where all of the influential institutions were shouting into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. “Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.”

There could be no more perfect evidence of the desperation among U.S. officials dealing with Iraq than the choice of veteran Baathist and CIA hireling Iyad Allawi as prime minister of the “sovereign” government due to take office after June 30. As one embittered Iraqi told me from Baghdad on Friday: “The appointment must have been orchestrated by Ahmed Chalabi in order to discredit the entire process.” He was not entirely joking, given the fact that Chalabi joined the rest of the Governing Council in voting for Allawi despite their long and vicious rivalry.

Though he is Shiite, Allawi was once upon a time an active Baathist, a member of Saddam Hussein’s political party, and is thought to enjoy much support among the officer corps of the old Iraqi army, and by extension among many former Baathists and influential Sunni. Indeed, there are reports that the reason Ahmed Chalabi, the neoconservative favorite, urged his friends in the White House to dissolve the army last year — a decision now acknowledged to be the most disastrous of the occupation — was Chalabi’s fear of the support enjoyed by his rival (and cousin — everyone in Baghdad is related) within the military.

Allawi cut his political teeth as a strong-arm Baathist student organizer before being dispatched by the party to London to run the Iraqi Student Union in Europe. Apart from the Iraqis he dutifully monitored, other Arab students with whom he came in contact were of considerable interest in Saddam’s Baghdad, since they tended to be drawn from elite circles in the Middle East. They were also of more direct value to Allawi personally, garnering him a fruitful array of connections in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, which he then used with great effect in various business enterprises in the region. By the late 1970s he had become wealthy.

However, Allawi never lost his taste for the intrigue of intelligence operations and the company of intelligence officers. Soft-spoken, eloquent and persuasive, always ready to hint at a powerful connection or make a promise, he proved adept at telling them what they wanted to hear in language they could understand. In 1978, this mutual affection almost proved fatal. By that time, Allawi had reportedly entered into a relationship with the British security services, who were naturally keen to have a willing and well-informed source in the large and faction-ridden Arab student community in London. Word of this relationship reached the suspicious ears of Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, who dispatched a team armed with knives and axes to Allawi’s comfortable home in Kingston-upon-Thames to deal with the problem in summary fashion. Bursting into his bedroom, the assassins hacked at him as he lay beside his sleeping wife and were prevented from finishing the job only by the fortuitous appearance of his father-in-law, who happened to be staying in the house. The would-be killers ran off and the badly injured Allawi lived to make more money and pursue his connections with British intelligence.

At the time of the 1991 war, Allawi scented the interest of Saudi intelligence and joined forces with his fellow ex-Baathist, Salih Omar, in producing the Voice of Free Iraq. The pair soon fell out, however, reportedly because of a dispute over a $40,000 check from their Saudi paymasters. Omar gradually faded from sight, while Allawi retained control of the group they had founded, the Iraqi National Accord (Al Wifaq), into which he steadily recruited former Baathist Sunnis, and was soon back in London, awaiting fresh clients. He found them among his old connections at British intelligence, MI6, and, a few years later, the CIA, which was simultaneously funding Ahmed Chalabi’s exile organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

“The two were supported by different factions at the agency,” recalls one veteran of the Iraq program. “Iyad Allawi was the more likable of the two; he didn’t act the grand pasha like Chalabi used to. But there was no there there — he didn’t have anyone inside Iraq. It was like recruiting a White Russian [pro-Czarist] to overthrow Stalin in 1938.”

At a well-appointed conservative think tank in downtown Washington and across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S. government and military?

The Iraqi neocon favorite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the “axis of evil” for decades. All the while the neocons cosseted, promoted and arranged for more than $30 million in Pentagon payments to the George Washington manqué of Iraq. In return, he fed them a steady diet of disinformation, and in the run-up to the war he sent various exiles to nine nations’ intelligence agencies to spread falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction. If the administration had wanted other material to provide a rationale for invasion, no doubt that would have been fabricated. Either Chalabi perpetrated the greatest con since the Trojan horse or he was the agent of influence for the most successful intelligence operation conducted by Iran, or both.

The CIA and other U.S. agencies had long ago decided that Chalabi was a charlatan, so their dismissive and correct analysis of his lies prompted their suppression by the Bush White House. In place of the normal channels of intelligence vetting, a jury-rigged system was hastily constructed, running from the office of the vice president to the newly created Office of Special Plans inside the Pentagon, staffed by fervent neocons. CIA Director George Tenet, possessed with the survival instinct of the inveterate staffer, ceased protecting the sanctity of his agency and cast in his lot with Cheney et al. Secretary of State Colin Powell, resistant internally but eventually overcome, decided to become the most ardent champion, unveiling a series of neatly manufactured lies before the United Nations. Last week Powell declared, “It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I’m disappointed, and I regret it.” But who had “deliberately” misled him? He did not say. Now the FBI is investigating espionage, fraud and by implication treason.

A disruptive technology is any new gizmo that puts an end to the good life for technologies that preceded it. Personal computers were disruptive, toppling mainframes from their throne. Yes, mainframe computers are still being sold, but IBM today sells about $4 billion worth of them per year compared to more than three times that amount a decade ago. Take inflation into account, and mainframe sales look even worse. Cellular telephones are a disruptive technology, putting a serious hurt on the 125 year-old hard-wired phone system. For the first time in telephone history, the U.S. is each year using fewer telephone numbers than it did the year before as people scrap their fixed phones for mobile ones and give up their fax lines in favor of Internet file attachments. Ah yes, the Internet is itself a disruptive technology, and where we’ll see the WRT54G and its brethren shortly begin to have startling impact.

You see, it isn’t what the WRT54G does that matters, but what it CAN do when reprogrammed with a different version of Linux with different capabilities.

Yes, smartypants, I know that other wireless access points and routers run Linux or can be made to run Linux. It didn’t take long for hackers to figure out that Apple’s original AirPort access point used a version of the 486 processor and could be convinced to speak Linux. But the WRT54G is different. This is a $70, not a $299 box and its use of Linux is no secret. Linksys, now owned by Cisco, not only doesn’t mind your hacking the box, they are including some of those hacks in their revised firmware.

oger W. Straus Jr., the brash and opinionated grandee who presided for nearly six decades over the book-publishing company that bore his name, the last surviving representative of the age of independent houses owned privately by gentlemen of literary taste, died Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was pneumonia, said his son, Roger Straus III.

With its distinguished list of authors and its course set almost entirely at the proprietor’s discretion, Farrar, Straus & Giroux — as it was known for much of its existence — approached uniqueness as the conglomeration boom swept through the publishing trade in the 1960’s and 70’s.

“It’s an object of great curiosity,” an industry member told The New York Times in 1978. “Very rare — like an antique spinning wheel or a nickelodeon.” But even Mr. Straus finally acknowledged the squeeze of market forces on his specialty shop. He sold the company 10 years ago to a European media giant, though he remained largely in charge.

Mr. Straus, whose East Side town house doubled as one of New York’s premier literary salons, was never shy about speaking out on behalf of his publishing style. He would say of the conglomerates that they were “being run by accountants, businessmen and lawyers who have very little concern for the book.” He concluded, “They could just as well be selling string, spaghetti or rugs.”

He was equally critical of what he considered the overhyping of books, of book awards in the United States, of the state of book reviewing and of what giant bookstore chains were doing to the marketing of books.

“Most publishers seem like wallpaper,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1977 in response to a question about his outspokenness and availability to the press. “Most of them today are either promoted bookkeepers or ambitious men and women who care only for power and couldn’t care less what they actually publish.” He concluded, “If publishers don’t say much, it’s probably because they don’t have much to say.”